43rd Annual Gender Studies Symposium

We are accepting submissions for the Gender Studies Symposium in March 2024. Please review our Call for Proposals for submission guidelines. All submissions are due by Friday, November 3 at 5 pm.

The 43rd Annual Gender Studies Symposium, “Being Online,” will focus on the ways in which digital technology, internet platforms, and online spaces have shaped and been shaped by understandings and expressions of gender and sexuality. This year’s events explore gender, sexuality, and digital technologies by thinking about issues of work, leisure, sex, violence, family, privacy, activism, identity, self-expression, and more. Some questions that arise for us:

• How do gender and sexuality influence the ways we use the internet, social media, and digital technologies?
• How has the internet been a space for finding safety, building community, and forging feminist and LGBTQ+ resistance? At the same time, how has the internet facilitated violence, abuse, and harassment?
• How have online spaces been an outlet for self-expression and creativity around gender and sexuality?
• How has the growth of the online sex work industry and dating apps affected sex, intimacy, and labor?
• How do people with identities as gender and sexual minorities experience obstacles or opportunities in the tech industry?
• What aspects of data mining and digital surveillance are revealed when we focus on privacy and security in relation to gender and sexuality?
• How do technologies like algorithms and artificial intelligence amplify, reinforce, challenge, or undermine gender biases, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia?

We hope this symposium inspires dialogue about these changing technologies and their relationship to gender and sexuality.

2023-24 student co-chairs:
Molly Gibbons ’24, Cameron Kalopsis ’24, and August van Nieuwenhuysen ’25